The specification relates to a system and method for machine translation. In particular, the specification relates to translating a feed for a social network.
Social network applications are growing in popularity. These services appeal to millions of people all over the world. Collectively, these users communicate in many different languages.
Users access the social network application using a browser or a thin-client application stored on a client device. The social network application provides the user with a social feed that is displayed by the client. This feed includes content such as user updates, comments and other content common to social networks. Frequently this feed will include content in languages that are not used by the user. For example, the user speaks the Spanish language but the content is displayed in the English language. The user desires to have the content translated from the English language to the Spanish language. Existing translation solutions have numerous problems.
First, existing solutions require all the content in a social feed to be translated. However, users frequently only want a portion of the social feed to be translated. Second, existing solutions cannot translate content in the social feed based off of inferences regarding the user's preferred language. Existing translation solutions have numerous other problems.